AAPL hit a high of $411.85
today and is now hovering around the $410 mark with just under an hour left
before trading ends today. The stock is up 2.4 percent today while the overall
market is down 1.28 percent.

There's a lot of hype on these boards about this stock. Anyone fairly new to investing should be careful. There are a lot of people interested in keeping this stock propped up from jo blo garage investor to wallstreet powerhouses.

They'll keep riding the wave and posting on boards like these because it's in their interest.

Apple has been experiencing growth for the better part of a decade, and they just lost a key person responsible for it.

Shares are so expensive that you'd have to invest tens of thousands to see any kind of meaningful return. Remember that no matter what the news and no matter how good the outlook may seem, wallstreet is a casino with different interests beyond what you read about on yahoo finance. It's just as likely the stock will fall.

There is a strong correlation between stock performance and company performance. If the company's profit grows, the stock follows, and if the company's profit stalls or falls, the stock drops.

It may take a while for the information to propagate, but it will. People are cautious to buy, quick to sell. So long as Apple remains more profitable next year than this year the stock will maintain it's extremely high price and any drop is a good reason to buy unless the drop has to do with flat profit.

While the stock may not fall in the next few quarters, it is inevitable that Apple's stock value will decrease unless they diversify away from high margin, first-to-market devices.

Think about it, there aren't that many new *products* to get to market first and while apple had "sleek" on their side, miniaturization continues and everyone will be sleek soon, everyone will have ample features, but only apple will be pricing themselves out of the market.

Premium price is paid by early adopters and sheeple. Problem is, once they aren't early adopter type devices anymore, the sheeple scramble unable to discern a reason why they would pay a premium for the apple brand.

It's happened before with PCs (IBM), phones (blackberry), and we have to assume the same will occur with tablets.

Apple is constrained to use hardware the rest of the industry develops. They can't pull magic out of a hat for much longer and remember, their rise with personal mobile devices hinged on an very short transition period in history, not within a mature established market.

It's not inevitable that the stock value will decrease unless they diversify away from high margin, first to market devices.

What you're saying is they need to move to lower margin mass market devices, and that is no guarantee that their stock value will increase.

The hard question is if there are still high margin products Apple can continue to grow into. If there are then Apple's growth will continue.

One huge market you seem to have missed is the PC market. 450m PCs are sold a year at about $600 to $1200 that Apple doesn't tap into. The ASP for the Mac is $1400. Roughly that means there's 400m PCs sold a year Apple isn't profiting from.

Guess what? They can now sell a $500 to $800 device. Imagine if they slapped a keyboard onto it and sell it for $600 to $900. That's a huge untapped market going forward in the next decade.

Apple is absolutely constrained to use hardware the rest of the industry develops. The key is that due to their large warchest, they can tap into the hardware a year or two before everyone else does and lock up the market.

They've successfully done so for over a decade now: iPod, with the 1.8" HDD, iPod with the 1" HDD, Flash for iPods, iPhones, shuffles, iPads, and MBAs, multitouch screens for iPhones and iPads, high resolution screens for iPhones and iPod touches, etc.

Much longer is the question, yes? They've done it since 2001. What makes you think 2012 is going to be different?

I didn't claim it would happen as soon as 2012, but the difference is they are running out of *new* devices and features that people are willing to pay a premium for.

Technology gains are making the features worth the price premium, cheaper to implement and those subsets of features, while they were adopted earlier by Apple, are now going to trickle down to lower cost manufacturers.

I realize you don't understand, and I am done discussing it because it's silly, I was making a prediction and will be proven correct over the course of time without any need to prove it to you.